Wednesday, March 12, 2014

Bolt Action - Cold Wars Photo Action

After a long weekend with all my fellow BARbarians in Lachlan's favorite Amish town, Lancaster, I've finally come back to the (mostly) real world. Care to check out what you missed? Or, for those that were there, what you might not have noticed?

Bolt Action, ho!

Things kicked off with our Tank Fight on Friday afternoon.

Fourteen teams participated in this two-game tournament, and three of the players were playing their first two games ever of Bolt Action, making it a success before a die was cast in the TO's estimation.

Yes, that list happened. The world can thank Scott. Baxter, however, will do no such thing!

You'll notice in many of the Tank Fight pictures scraps of paper on the tables. We played scenarios where areas of the table could be captured - not unlike the Domination games of Flames of War played I-95 way - and recaptured as the game went on. The winner was determined, basically, by which side had captured more of the points as the game ended. These scraps were used to indicate which side controlled which areas. Maybe I'll paint up one hundred objectives for the next fourteen team tournament if we play these scenarios again. Maybe.

Prizes were awarded for all sorts of reasons. WWPD and BoltAction.Net provided an IS-2, Churchill, and Tiger I from diewaffenkammer.com, a T-70 from HAD, and a Soviet SMG squad and Soviet heavy artillery piece from BTD. Osprey Publishing provided several WWII reference books, and Gregg from boltaction.easyarmy.com chipped in a $40 Warlord Games certificate on the condition that it be awarded to the player that finished in last place. Congrats, Miles! At least that Maus modellooked amazing!

Chris and his teammate Blaise came in first place. Congratulations to Blaise for playing so well in his first two games of Bolt Action. Gordon and the rest of the Northern Virginia crew were devastated; so badly, in fact, that someone ended up spilling on their own Eclipse board, long after the event had ended.

The next day, the standard 1000-point tournament took place. I don't want to steal any of Captain TO's thunder reporting much on it, but if you're interested in his most current update, you can see it here.

Before we get into shots of the standard event, I present to you, a beard-off.

Well done, gentlemen.

Downstairs, there was an immense Pegasus Bridge game being played using the Bolt Action rules.

Apparently, the Amish shun treadmills. This was outside the room, in the snow.

As usual, Cold Wars was a blast. It was our biggest event yet, and here's hoping that the games at Historicon are bigger yet.